Papastephanou The Philosopher v2

49
Te Philosopher, the Sophist,

the Undercurrent and Alai Badiou
Marianna Papastephanou
University of Cyprus
Introduction
B
adiou maintains a sharp dis-
tinction between things as pure
multiplicities, on the one hand,
and the relations between things within a determinate world,
on the other. Much against various insidious naturalizations
and essentializations, Badiouian ontology insists that things
as pure multiplicities are not accompanied by any qualitative
determinations. The later come into play only when things
are viewed in relation to one another in virtue of the general
laws of a determinate world. But such laws are not laws of
the things themselves; for, all laws, physical or biological
or psychological, or juridical, are laws of appearing in the
context of a singular world.
1
Consequently, all asymmetries we come across in the realm
of social ontology, e.g. asymmetries in wealth or power, have
nothing to do with the being qua being of those multiplicities
which constitute the pairs of the asymmetrical relation (e.g.
1
Alain Badiou, The Three Negations, Cardozo Law Review 29, 5: 1880.
Speculations II
50
people as rich and poor or strong and weak). Such asymmetries
result, rather, from the inscription of pure multiplicities in the
relational framework of a specic, determinate world. Badiou
names this inscription the appearing of the multiplicity in
a singular world. A thing is in the world of mathematics or
ontology but it also exists as an object in a concrete world
because of its appearing in a social ontology. But being and
appearing are not equivalent; the qualitative determinations
of existence in a world make sure that something which just
is (as a multiplicity) in absolute terms (logically something
simply is or is not) will now appear in relative terms (it will be
recognized more or less).
2
For instance, people as multiplicities
are; yet, as rich or poor and strong or weak appear more or
less in the light or in the shadow of the order of a given world.
Whilst things present themselves regardless of whether they
are recognized as such, objects are represented more or less
as valued identities in a situation.
3
When something is not
represented and appears as nothing in this world, or when
it appears with the minimal degree of intensity, it is named
an inexistent multiplicity.
4
To Badiou, this distinction between being qua being
and existence, which is also a distinction between a thing
and an object, is fundamental,
5
amongst other things, for
preserving a distinction between the ontology of truth and
the epistemology of what passes as assertible or veridical
at a given time according to the laws of the determinate
world. Such distinctions ground the tension between, on
the one hand, a surplus of truth that cannot be drawn from
the resources of a world governed by a specic order and, on
the other hand, a social currenc that is based on what makes
sense and has gained hegemony in that given world. Such
hegemony eecting inclusions and exclusions is warranted
2
Badiou, The Three Negations, 1881.
3
Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum,
2007), 134.
4
5
Ibid., 1880.
Marianna Papastephanou Te Philosopher, the Sophist
51
by recourse to mistaken equations of the current order of the
specic world with a supposedly natural order of things. For
Badiou, nature buries inconsistency and turns away from
the void.
6
Hence, nature can be dened in Badiouian terms
as that which imposes limits on the range and scope of what
is counted t for presentation (as opposed to what presents
itself without being recognized as such) under this or that
prevalent conceptual, juridical or socio-political order.
7
While acknowledging and emphasizing the import of the
above ideas, I claim that Badiou does not make much room
in his philosophy for the onto-epistemological signicance
of undercurrents of life and thought within a given world.
I argue that forcing Badious position up against what I
consider to be its own limits allows us to view the idea of
the undercurrent as a multi-faceted challenge: to the place
Badiou allocates to the sophist and the philosopher; to the
priority he gives to the event and to evental consequences;
to his outlook on social ontology, nature, representation
and knowledge; to the irruptive and exceptional character
of evental truth incriminating the quotidian and seting it
in sharp contrast to the new; and to his seeing truth from
the perspective of action rather than from that of judgment.
Truth, Sense and Judgment:
the philosopher and the sophist
The distinction between the ontology of truth, and the epis-
temology of socially current, accumulated knowledge must
remain sharp, Badiou argues, for otherwise thought risks to fall
prey either to conventionalism or to dogmatism. Philosophy
must insist that there are local truths, not just conventions,
and seize them from the maze of sense.
8
Yet, at the same time,
philosophy must defend the locus of Truth only as an empty
6
Badiou, Being and Event, 177.
7
Christopher Norris, Badious Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2009).
8
Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany:
suny Press, 1999), 126.
Speculations II
52
albeit operativecategory. It is no longer legitimate for the
philosopher to say, as does the dogmatist, that there is a sole
locus of Truth and that this locus is revealed by philosophy
itself. One of the risks involved in dogmatic positions is the
transformation of philosophy from the rational operation
it must be into the dubious path of an initiation
9
and into
the ecstatic sacralization, up to levels of terror, of a unique
place of Truth.
But, as stated above, the philosopher must be equally prepared
to confront her most astute adversary, the thinker who claims
that there are no truths but only technics for statements and
loci of enunciation. Badiou personalizes this adversary with
the gure of the sophist, ancient and modern. However, he
does not recommend the kind of intellectual warfare that
would lead to anti-sophistic extremism. Philosophy goes
astray when it nourishes the dark desire of nishing o the
sophist once and for all. When acting thus, philosophy is led
to the dogmatic claim that the sophist, since he is like a per-
verted double of the philosopher, ought not to exist. Badiou
condemns unequivocally such philosophical atitudes and
makes clear that the sophist must only be assigned to his
place.
10
Barbara Cassin criticizes Badiou on this by arguing
that the degree of freedom separating the act of eradication
from that of assigning a place is perilously slim.
11
I would like
to add a somewhat dierent objection: that the place assigned
to the sophist regarding truth cannot be as xed and perhaps
as distinct from the one assigned to the philosopher as it may
seem at rst sight. This objection will not be deployed here
but it will be kept constantly in view. What is important, for
the moment, is that, for Badiou, philosophy may raise the
objection to the sophist of the local existence of truths; it
goes astray when it proposes the ecstasy of a place of Truth.
12
But how do truths manifest themselves as truths in a world
9
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 133.
10
Ibid., 133.
11
Barbara Cassin, Whos Afraid of the Sophists?, Hypatia 15, 4: 120.
12
53
of unelastic order and xed laws, a world which precludes
truths in the rst place and excludes elements from the count-
as-one that consolidates consistent multiplicities? Afer all,
Badiou himself approaches any truth as a transgression of
the law. Of course, this does not mean a radical disconnec-
tion of truth and law; on the contrary, it presupposes that a
truth depends on the law and on the knowledge that goes
hand in hand with the law, a knowledge that will be shat-
tered by the truth that transgresses it. Yet, transgression also
signies that a truth is nevertheless a negation of the law.
13

Arguably, for Badiou, while truth will always depend on the
very law that it will come to disrupt, no truth will ever be a
law in the sense of enjoying the status of something that may
be recognized as valid now andsubject, of course, to fallibil-
ist precautionsperhaps valid for all time. Or, put in other
words, truth evaporates the very moment that it enters social
ontology and becomes established knowledge. As knowledge,
it will invite yet another new truth-event that will come to
shater epistemic order.
Hence, the diculty persists: how does truth enter the
picture (the world of appearing) without losing its character,
and how does philosophy seize it? The diculty becomes more
serious by Badious assertion that nothing is presentable in
a situation otherwise than under the eect of structure, that
is, under the form of the one and its composition in consis-
tent multiplicities.
14
Even the central truth of ontology i.e.,
the truth of its essentially subtractive character, is concealed
from enquirers simply through the fact that by ver denition
those excluded elements cannot gure within the count-as-
one or be perceived as integral or constituent parts of any
existent situation.
15
Then, how does philosophy seize local
truths from the maze of sense, if the later is so overwhelm-
ingly dominant in its unifying tendency toward consistency?
13
14
15
Norris, Badious Being and Event, 62.
Speculations II
54
Partly,
16
the answer comes from another Badiouian concept,
that of the inconsistent multiplicity which manifests itself
in the guise of crises, unresolved contradictions, anomalies
and problems encountered in the process of enquiry. What
in-consists also disrupts the smooth ow of quotidian nor-
malcy that accompanies a consistent multiplicity. Therefore,
philosophy should bear witness to problematic situations,
gaps in knowledge, paradoxes, etc., so as to be ready to seize
the truth involved in them. A possible objection to this is,
in my view, the fact that philosophy has, at times, exercised
(surely not consistently enough) a radical power of thought
precisely by thematizing the un-problematic, by focusing on
the taken-for-granted rather than by operating exclusively on
what has already emerged and been perceived as a diculty
or a crisis. The dependence of philosophy on something
that has already appeared in the guise of a problem makes
philosophy parasitic upon crisis and jeopardizes its potential
for radically rethinking a seemingly un-problematic ow of
quotidian normalcy. Thereby, the dependence of philosophy
on what in-consists brings Badiouan thought much closer
to Deweyan or later-day pragmatism (given the central-
ity pragmatism atributes to criticality as problem-solving)
than to philosophy as has sometimes been practiced from
antiquity on. For, philosophy has sometimes been an aporetic
operation regarding what precisely belongs to the realm of
un-problematic, tension- or controversy-free and smooth cur-
rent of things. Unlike it, a philosophy that is parasitic upon
crisis becomes more tamed and domesticated, less stirring,
as it appears more problem-inspired rather than problem-
and-controversy-creating.
This is a challenge that concerns what the very ontology of
Badiou allows and the way in which it relies on the opposi-
tion of evental truth to being, and, further, of presentation to
theoretical representation. Let us see, rst, how the new and
the evental-truth (and, in my view, this conjunction raises
16
Another answer may come from Badious notion of forcing, but, as it does
not aect what is discussed in this article, I shall leave it aside.
55
many issues of qualication) come up as a break with ontology
and why we may consider philosophy qua representational
discourse as ill-ting in the whole operation. Badiou explains
that in a given world, we have something new only if the
rational or conventional laws of this world are interrupted,
or put out of their normal eects, by something which hap-
pens. Badiou names it an Event, a kind of occurrence whose
consequences sustain a negative relationship to the laws of
the world.
17
As I see it, viewed as operating within the realm
of representation, philosophy is taken to be lagging behind
presentation. For it awaits something to occur, to come up as
a break, in order to seize it, rather than itself paving the path
for something to occur and to break the balance of power
within a determinate world.
Then, Badiou names the multiplicity composed of the
consequences of the event an evental-truth. The new, which
interrupts the conventional laws, has truth as its consequence.
And, a truth, in a rst sense, is a part of the world, because
it is a set of consequences of the event in the world, and not out-
side. But in a second sense, we can say that a truth is like a
negation of the world, because the event itself is subtracted
from the rational or conventional laws of the world.
18
The
only way in which a truth is part of the world is exclusively
owed to truths being a set of consequences of the event in
the world. Is truth never a part of the world when it appears
dissociated from a prior eventif the later is understood
as that which suspends or cancels the normal eects of the
lawor dissociated from perceivable consequences or from
major changes? Does philosophy never introduce something
new, which, in some cases, it may happen to be not just new
but also true, even if it does not atract, regretably, the aten-
tion of large numbers of agents in a determinate world so as
to eect a radical redirection?
I argue that truth can be a part of a specic world as a spe-
cic judgment, even as an aphorism, regardless of whether
17
18
Ibid., 1878. My emphasis.
Speculations II
56
it is recognized as such by the majority of individuals in
the world and whether it inspires them to swing into action
or not. Something that does happen or is utered as a truth,
i.e., it raises validity claims that meet requirements of truth
(apart from the requirement of consequences), may have no
lasting impact, or it may be bypassed; it may be recognized
as true only retrospectively. That it existed only as part of an
undercurrent of thought does not undo its being a part of
that world or its being true. And, as to its potential to inspire
and motivate change, this is a mater of the atitude towards
it that a society might be capable of cultivating. To explain,
it is an educational mater whether individuals learn to
seek the undercurrent of their times so as to judge its truth
claims beyond ideological constraints of prominence. It is
also an educational mater of powerful criticality whether
individuals learn to go beyond the rationalizations that are
ofen involved in those justications that achieve the status
of recognized social currency and conventional wisdom at
a given time.
Surely, Badiouian moves such as making truth dependent
on the event and theorizing truth as a set of consequences
have the merit of coupling truth with disclosure, of breath-
ing enthusiastic action into truth and of backing it up with
an ethic of commitment. But these theoretical moves are
accompanied with diculties such as: the incrimination of
the entire rational sphere of a determinate world regarding a
specic issue, i.e., an incrimination of ontology as always the
opposite, the negative, of the event and its truths; the exclu-
sion of truth as a judgment and/or a propositional content
that remains valid even if a specic era blocks its possibility
of bearing eects and consequences; and, in turn, a forced
drastic choice between presentation and representation that
connes theory to dominant and received views reecting
the order of the one in any given world.
Let me explain the later. Badiou distinguishes what the
theory presents from presentation.
19
Thus, what the term
19
57
presentation signies is the totality of those elements that
oer themselves as potential candidates for membership,
whether or not that potential is realized by their actually be-
ing so treated.
20
By contrast, to follow Christopher Norriss
parlance again, what the theory presents is what nds an
accredited, duly acknowledged place in those various prevail-
ing systems. Prevailing systems decide what shall count as
a member or constituent of some given set, group or class.
21

Following this through to its implications, we may conclude
that presentation is never theorized, concurrently with what
a theory presents, in a way that could contest the allocation
of place within a prevailing system.
As I see it, this runs the risk of equating the theoretical claims
of an era with its dominant theories, and of trapping us into
an either/or: here is the presentation, there is the theoretical
representation. Such an either/or precludes the study of the
idea of an undercurrent of thought, an idea that is, in my view,
neglected in Badious philosophy not because of some kind
of dereliction but because of binary oppositions such as the
above. Those do not make room for the non-prevailing-yet-
theoretical-or-theorizable voiceprior to its becoming strong
enough to have consequences. A voice of this kind I dene
as an undercurrent. It concerns a thought or practice within
a determinate world that hovers between presentation and
representative order. It speaks for what the dominant repre-
sentation excludes but it has not gained the wider atention
or acceptance presupposed by any eective contestation of
established order. The undercurrent can be either a half- or
badly-buried theoretical claim or a lived experience that
is availablethough so taken-for-granted as to be almost
imperceptiblein a given world and reects a judgment of
possibly universal validity and evental consequences. I say
possibly because, evidently, not all undercurrents serve truth.
To meet truth conditions, it is not enough just to oppose a
specic order; more qualications regarding the truth of a
20
21
Ibid., 62.
Speculations II
58
propositional content are required.
The undercurrent cannot be easily accommodated in Ba-
dious bipolar ontology of being and event, and of presenta-
tion and what theory presents, also due to his treatment of
truth as distinct from judgment, propositional content and
epistemology. How Badious thinking proceeds in such mat-
ters can be shown by reference to universalism. Traditional
conceptions of universality, from Aristotle, to Kant and down
to present-day analytic philosophy see universalism as the
realization of a universal judgment about some real thing.
To those grammatical conceptions of universalism Badiou
opposes a creative conception, one that sees universalism
as always the result of a great process that opens with an
event.
22
It is a great merit of Badiouian universalism that,
within it, to create something universal is to go beyond
evident dierences and separations. The elaboration of this
assumption, into which we cannot delve now, oers a robust
and valuable refutation of facile multiculturalist accounts of
identity and dierence. But, such theoretical benets need
not be grounded in formulations that 1) give philosophically
an almost pejorative sense to judgment, 2) rigidly discon-
nect ontology and politics from epistemology and 3) make
a grammatical conception of truth completely expendable.
For instance, a true idea that remains an undercurrent may
as such have a counterfactual universal validityeven if this
validity has not yet been recognized by a given world or by
most of the thinkers of that specic world, perhaps not even
by most of the thinkers of a subsequent world. That Badiou
sees the dierence between a grammatical conception of
truth and a conception of truth as a creation, a process, an
event
23
as crucial and absolute can be shown by the fact that
this dierence allows Badiou to claim that he is not at all in-
terested in the content of Saint Pauls kergma. He asserts that
he is only interested in the operational, procedural character
22
Alain Badiou, Universal Truths and the Question of Religion: Interview
with A.S. Miller, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 3, 1 (2005): 39.
23
Badiou, Universal Truths, 39.
59
of it and its evental consequences.
24
But it is not obvious why
this dierence renders the grammatical conception of truth
less important or why the later cannot be incorporated into
the Badiouian conception. Within the broad argument of
the ontological accommodation of the undercurrent, which
I am promoting here, the two conceptions can be reconciled
and the grammatical conception can be treated as the content
of the creative conception of truth, on grounds of which the
whole venture of turning a truth into universal inspiration
to creating new realities is felt as worthwhile.
Saint Paul and the Ancient World
The above can be corroborated by reference to Badious own
exemplary gure, Saint Paul. To Badiou, Pauls unprecedented
gesture consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian
grasp, be it that of a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a
social class.
25
My critique of Badiou and my interpolation
of the undercurrent, as I have indicated it above, can thus be
argued out by considering Badious verdict regarding what
preceded Pauls gesture and by discussing the pre-evental. To
Badiou, Pauls statementthere is neither Jew nor Greek, there
is neither slave nor freeis a genuinely stupefing statement
when one knows the rules of the ancient world.
26
Indeed it is
stupefying, and especially so when one knows the rules of
the ancient world, and I emphasize each word of the later
phrase. It is stupefying when one: focuses on the knowledge
that the accumulated, dominant and standardized opinion
establishes by treating nuance as insignicant detail, unable
to change the big picture; harkens to the rules that divert
our atention from the exception within social ontology
or from the non-dominant tendency of thought, from the
undercurrent; and treats the ancient world as a unied and
24
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: Te Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1.
25
Ibid., 5.
26
Ibid., 5. My emphasis.
Speculations II
60
homogenized historical site on which the rules of represen-
tation are imposed in hindsight and leave the then existent
yet non-dominant view unaccounted for.
To substantiate these objections, I turn to the ancient world
so as to establish a connection between the truth of Pauls
statement and those undercurrents of Greek antiquity that
had already voiced such a truth. Universalist egalitarianism
was part of the ancient world; that it was one of litle bear-
ing does not justify its current theoretical obliteration that
underlies the presentation of the Pauline statement as a
miraculous interruption of the supposedly univocal theoreti-
cal ow that crowned the quotidian normalcy of antiquity.
There is no question about the pre-evental character of the
truths of those undercurrents of thought, especially when
judged on grounds of consequence. The dissemination of
the truth of their propositional content and the prospect
for powerful eects surely remained nothing other than a
counterfactual possibility throughout the ancient world. Yet
the truth of those undercurrents can be of value for us, with
the benet of hindsight. For, we may thus extrapolate a wider
ontological claim that the theoretical appearing is not always
so antipodic to the being of a thing. And we may thus divert
some atention from the rigid segregation of ontology and
epistemology to the possibility of instances of reconciliation
of them (without losing sight of their distinctiveness) within
the broad scope of a realist theory of truth.
The tendency is usually to approach a determinate world
(e.g. ancient Greek) at its strongest, i.e., focusing on the most
glaring and, at the same time, fruitful characteristic of it, in
other words, on its unique, unprecedented, perhaps evental
contribution to thought. For instance, regarding Greek antiq-
uity, one may focus on the matheme (Badiou) or on the poem
(Heidegger) as such a contribution. However, if the notion of
the undercurrent is to have the onto-epistemological signi-
cance I atribute to it, the most appropriate move seems to me
to approach the ancient world at its weakest, where the ques-
tion of whether a situation is deprived of evental truth and of
whether the quotidian and its totality of ideas constitute an
61
ontology at sharp contrast to inconsistent multiplicity can be
explored. Given Badious reading of Pauls statement, since
the idea that there is neither Greek nor barbarian appears
to be at the furthest remove from Greek theorization, and
since Greek antiquity appears to have never seriously chal-
lenged the institution of slavery, but, on the contrary, to have
determined it as natural, these two will be my focal points.

Te Greek and the Barbarian
One may nd abundant textual support to the claim that
the ancient Greek world held a deep prejudice against the
non-Greek and that ancient philosophy never questioned
such a prejudice
27
and its concomitant social rules. Worse,
philosophy furnished that world with ample justicatory
material that was crucial for the reproduction and perpetu-
ation of its prejudicial self-understanding.
At rst sight, the ancient everyday normalcy contained
no contradiction, no challenge to that prejudice. Yet, upon
closer inspection, it becomes evident that there had been an
undercurrent of practices that questioned the prejudicial
division of the Greek and the barbarian. For, in the seventh
and sixth centuries the tyrannies and the Orphic cults had
begun to lay the foundations for cosmopolitanism. Amongst
other things, the former had not restricted the immigration
of barbarians and the later were open to all men, not to
Greeks alone. By the time of Aristotle there had arisen a
large body of opinion which maintained that the popular
prejudice against the barbarians was entirely unjustied;
28

Diogenes the Cynic was said to envision a world-state where
barbarian and Greek could live together on equal terms.
29

27
For a very interesting exception, see Platos Statesman (262c-e), where
Plato says that it is ridiculous to divide humankind into Greeks and non-
Greeks. See also Robert Schlaifer, Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer
to Aristotle, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 47 (1936): 170.
28
Ibid., 168-169.
29
Lester H. Rifin, Aristotle on Equality: A Criticism of A.J. Carlyles Theory,
Journal of the Histor of Ideas, 14, 2 (1953): 276.
Speculations II
62
Still, this alone can hardly be formulated as a theoretical
undercurrent of elaborate exposition of an argument that
contravened the dominant view on the barbarian.
Yet such an argument existed. It was not formulated by a
philosopher, but by a sophist, Antiphon, who was, amongst
other things, a skilled mathematician (he tried to square the
circle). Antiphon wrote a tract On Truth [Peri Aletheias] in the
context of a late-fh century eort to inquire into reality, ta
onta.
30
From its extant fragments we can draw the conclusion
that it defended equality for all, Greeks and barbarians alike.
31

Here is the relevant passage:
(of more familiar societies) we understand and respect; those of distant
societies we neither understand nor respect. This means that we have
become barbarians in our relations with one another, for by nature we
are all equally equipped in every respect to be barbarians and Greeks.
This is shown by examining those factors which are by nature necessary
among all human beings and are provided to all in terms of the same
capacities; it is in these very factors that none of us is dierentiated
as a barbarian or a Greek. We all breathe into the air with our mouths
and with our nostrils, and we all laugh when there is joy in our mind,
or we weep when suering pain; we receive sounds through our hear-
ing; we see when sunlight combines with our faculty of sight; we work
with our hands and we walk with our feet.
32

We cannot perform a close reading of the passage here, but,
what is important is that, translated into Badious idiom,
Antiphons position is that the dierentiation between Greek
and barbarian is a product of the laws of appearing within
a given world and not of nature. Being has no qualitative
determinations.
30
Carroll Moulton, Antiphon the Sophist, on Truth, Transactions and Pro-
ceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 103 (1972): 330.
31
Philip Merlan, Alexander the Great or Antiphon the Sophist?, Classical
Philology, 45, 3 (1950): 163.
32
POxy, 1364 and 3647. I take the English translation from Martin Ostwald,
Nomos and Phusis in Antiphons , in Cabinet of the Muses (eds)
M. Grith and D. J. Mastronarde (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 293-294.
63
Then again, does Antiphon use nature so as to relativize
all truth? If that were true, then, Antiphons position is just a
radicalization of the standard sophistic tenets against truth
pushed through to their ultimate implications. For what
the ancient or modern sophist claims to impose is precisely that
there is no truth, that the concept of truth is useless and uncertain,
since there are only conventions, rules, types of discourse or
language games.
33
Yet, on the contrary, Antiphon presses the
aletheia of nature against the doxa of laws and custom rather
than rejecting truth for the sake of sense and convention.
The rest of the extant part of Antiphons On Truth involves
so much tension between physis and nomos for the sake of the
former that the inevitable conclusion one draws from reading
it is that he had a realist conception of truth as mind- and
community-independent as well as critical and corrective of
the various versions of nomos. Here is an indicative passage:

if someone breaches lawfulness and passes unnoticed by its contractors,
he escapes social degradation and punishment. If he is observed, he
does not. But if a man, exceeding limits, harms the organic growths
of nature, the evil is neither less, if he passes totally unnoticed, nor
greater, if all men see. For he is harmed not through mens belief (doxa),
but through truth (aletheia) [ou dia doxan vlaptetai, alla di aletheian].
34

The Antiphontic antithesis between nomima (legal, custom-
ary) and physis, as expressed in the fragments, establishes that
physis corresponds to the word aletheia, with nomos parallel
to doxa. This would suggest that nature, for Antiphon, has the
value of truth.
35
The signicance of such an equation is that
nature becomes precisely the means for refuting the kind of
facile naturalism that eects exclusions and for promoting
the kind of universalism that we encountered in Saint Pauls
declaration that there is neither Jew nor Greek.
33
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 119. My emphasis.
34
POxy. 1364, col. My emphasis. I take the English translation from Moulton,
Antiphon the Sophist, 331.
35
Ibid., 334.
Speculations II
64
Let us unpack this point. As indicated in the rst section
of this article, Badiou deplores the fact that the idea of the
natural is recruited as a yardstick for discounting or excluding
the odd one out, that which does not belong to the consistent
count-as-one. Badiou combats such tendencies by claiming
ultimately that nature does not exist.
36
For, the idea of the
natural is prone to certain kinds of abusive extrapolation.
Among them is that which more-or-less surreptitiously derives
a notion of cultural, civic, socio-political or ethnic commu-
nity from a notion of the properly or naturally belonging-
together.
37
Much like Badiou, Antiphons employment of
nature combats those extrapolations that elevate opinion
to the status of a natural truth and thus justify disrespect
toward distant societies. But, unlike Badiou, Antiphon does
not associate the idea of nature exclusively with the negative
political implications of its use. On the contrary, Antiphon
exploits the positive political implications of nature. To that
purpose, and for reasons that concur with Badious commit-
ment to equality and universality, Antiphon demarcates in a
truly minimalist manner the commonalities that typify the
universal set of humanity. As Ostwald explains, the atack is
not directed at nomoi as such but at people who, in atribut-
ing too absolute a value to their own nomoi, fail to consider
the fact that physis accords no higher rank to one society or
ethnic group over another.
38
Merlan, for whom the Anti-
phon fragment anticipates the slogan fraternity, equality,
39

argues that Antiphon is the rst to have an entirely secular
idea of equality. In Antiphons case, the idea of brotherhood
of man originated without the idea of the fatherhood of God
as its counterpart. As a nonreligious idea, it is a protest
against prejudice in the name of naturethis nature being
conceived, as far as we can see, without any divine quality. The
equality of biological functions is the all-important factor in
36
37
38
Ostwald, Nomos and Phusis, 301.
39
Merlan, Alexander the Great, 164.
65
interhuman relations.
40
The cross-temporal originality of Antiphons move also
lies, amongst other things, in its dierence from well-known
modern atempts, e.g. such as Martha Nussbaums and Ju-
dith Shklars to ground cosmopolitanism in human nature
or in human vulnerability respectivelyfor it is far more
minimalist and neutral in qualitative determinations than
those. The recourse to the human body as universal proof of
a common humanity (which undoes the essentialism of the
distinction between Greek and barbarian by reducing it to a
socio-cultural determination) is in fact not quite a recourse
to human nature, as we normally approach it, but rather a
recourse to corporeality. By restricting the human common-
alities that nature grounds to a handful of basic bodily parts,
functions or reactions to life (e.g. weeping), Antiphon, in fact,
leaves out all those determinations that are usually given a
natural character even in our times. His move amounts to
saying that nature, other than the one accounted in his list,
does not exist.
At rst sight, this connects truth and ta onta principally
with the common human biological makeup. Against this, we
just need to recall that, for Badiou, biological laws belong to
the sphere of appearing rather than of being. Yet, by having
described in another passage the freedom that, beyond any
law, nature allows to eyes and ears and hands and feet that
move about unrestricted,
41
Antiphon makes nature-authorized
freedomrather than biology as suchan existential truth
in tension with the constraints imposed by varying customs
and prevailing systems/opinions.
42
Perhaps it would not be
40
Ibid., 164. I am not saying that this position is without problems or that it
can ground cosmopolitanism. Here I am more interested in its operations
rather than in its specic way of founding cosmopolitanism.
41
POxy. 1364, col. 3; Moulton, Antiphon the Sophist, 336.
42
It has been suggested that Antiphons list of bodily organs reects a
biological conception of the human being, but Moulton suggests another
possible interpretation: the list may be seen as a hold-over of the archaic
formula of expression of the human personality through the metonymy of
parts of the body, Moulton, Antiphon the Sophist, 337.
Speculations II
66
too far-fetched to suggest that, against our present-day, drastic
associations of corporeality either with nitude and servility
(recall here Badious contemptuous references to the biped
without feathers
43
) or with a supposedly unifying and univer-
salizing awareness of human mortality,
44
Antiphons position
represents a third option. For, to Antiphon, the conception of
the human as, more or less, a biped without feathers granted
by nature with freedom becomes a vehicle of subjectivization
and of demands for transcendence against the weight of in-
tuition, habit and vested interest, and a proof that humanity
cannot be censored, impeded and constrained. It is generally
true that wherever the appeal to nature is pressed hardest
or assumed to carry greatest intuitive weight one is likely to
nd a deep-laid resistance to precisely the kind of challenge
represented by a thinking beyond the furthest limits of cur-
rently accredited truth.
45
But, in the case of Antiphon, we have
the opposite: the appeal to nature is pressed hardest so that
doxastic qualitative dierentiations of ethnicity stop carrying
their time-honoured intuitive weight. Antiphon pressed this
appeal to nature for the sake of the counter-intuitive, for that
which went against the empirically warranted and, apparently,
natural dierence between Greek and barbarian. Thus, his
thinking challenged and went beyond the furthest limits of
the sense that used to pass as accredited truth.

Te Slave and the Free
As to slavery, are there any undercurrents in the ancient
world disrupting the smooth ow of conventional life and
resembling events in suspending time? Hesiodic poetry dis-
seminated, already from the 8
th
century B.C. on, a Golden Age
(the time of the reign of Cronus) narrative of equality. The
43
Alain Badiou, Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil, trans. Peter Hall-
ward (London: Verso, 2001), 12.
44
Iris Murdoch, Te Sovereignt of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1970), 74.
45
67
citizens of the Cronus time utopia willing, mild-mannered,
shared out the fruits of their labours together.
46
For Naddaf, that
Hesiod was a catalyst for Greek political paideia at its most
egalitarian is shown, amongst other things, by the Spartan king
Cleomeness famous saying: Homer for Spartiates, Hesiod
for helots [the slaves of the Spartans].
47
More importantly, at
the harvest time festival of the Cronia in Atica, masters and
slaves exchanged places, to recall the primitive equality of
Cronus time.
48
Resembling the event in its extracting from
a time the possibility of another time,
49
such heterotopia
becomes the momentary locus of relativization and subver-
sion of lived reality. I see heterotopias as practices through
which the social imaginary suspends the dominant time and
place and experiences possibilities that everyday normalcy
continuously blocks. Yet, they can also be practices through
which societies repress and keep out of sight their gloomy
realities. Just like most heterotopias of this kind, and as an
undercurrent of everydayness rather than of theory, the
Cronia festival is more suggestive, subconscious, functionalist
and enacted rather than thought out, articulated and applied.
Nevertheless, Hesiod, his importance for the helots and the
Cronia festival that it inspired could have acted as a proleptic
power of thought to assist philosophy to problematize slavery
and to undo the unitary space that slavery enjoyed throughout
the ancient world, Greek and non-Greek.
Again, the truth potential that the above oered was not
subtracted from the maze of sense by the pincers of the major
philosophers
50
but by those of others. Love, art, science and
46
Hesiod, Hesiod, Teogony, Works and Days, Testimonia, trans. Glenn W. Most
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 118-119. My emphasis.
47
Cf. Gerard Naddaf, Hesiod as a Catalyst for Western Political Paideia, Te
European Legac, 7, 3 (2002): 353.
48
Doyne Dawson, Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in the Greek World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14.
49
Alain Badiou, The Event in Deleuze, Parrhesia Vol. 2 (2007): 39.
50
On a summary of what philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle thought
about slavery, see Gregory Vlastos, Slavery in Platos Thought, Te Philo-
sophical Review 50, 3 (1941); for a contrast of Plato and Aristotle, see Rifin,
Speculations II
68
politics generate truths concerning situations; truths sub-
tracted from knowledge which are only counted by the state
in the anonymity of their being.
51
Representing the state on
the issue of slavery, Aristotle counted his adversaries in the
anonymity of their being. In Aristotles words:
there are otherswho regard the control of slaves by a master as con-
trary to nature. In their view the distinction of master and slave is due
to law or convention (nomos); there is no natural (physei) dierence
between them; the relation of master and slave is based on force, and
being so has no warrant in justice.
52

Who are those others to whom Aristotle does not refer by
name? Heidegger was interested in what took place between
the Presocratics and Plato. Badiou is interested in what took
place between eponymous sophists and Plato.
53
To answer
our question and then to examine whether there had been
a theoretical undercurrent that could have set in course a
dierent destination of thought we must become interested
in what took place between the anonymized others (mostly
sophists) and Aristotle on the issue of slavery.
To begin our discussion of what took place between the
anonymous adversaries and Aristotle let us set out from the
only Badiouian reference (that I have come across) to Aris-
totles politicization of natureone that might be relevant,
although implicitly, suggestively and somewhat cryptically,
to our issue here.
We live within an Aristotelian arrangement: there is nature, and beside
Aristotle on Equality, 278-280.
51
52
Aristotle, Politics, 1253b20-23. I take the English translation from Giuseppe
Cambiano, Aristotle and the Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, Slaver
and Abolition 8, 1 (1987): 22.
53
Yet I am not doing this in order to replace the Heideggerian genealogy
of the forgeting of being nor to dispute the importance of Badious meth-
odological imperative to forget the forgeting of the forgeting, Badiou,
Manifesto for Philosophy, 115.
69
it right, which tries as much as possible to correct, if needs be, the ex-
cesses of nature. What is dreaded, what must be foreclosed, is what is
neither natural nor amendable by right alone. In short, what is monstrous.
And in fact Aristotle encountered, in the guise of the monster, delicate
philosophical problems. Foucault and Sartre harboured, with regard to
this neo-Aristotelian naturalism, a genuine hatred. In actual fact, both
the one and the other, as they should, start out from the monster, from
the exception, from what has no acceptable nature.
54

Such delicate philosophical problems Aristotle encounters in
his eort to refute the argument against slavery by recourse
to nature. But the incapacity of nature to dierentiate the
body of the slave remains an unanswered question within
Aristotles philosophy of nature.
55
Indeed, Aristotle asserts
54
Alain Badiou, Te Centur, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2008), 177. Contra Badiou, I believe that we live in an Aristotelian
arrangement in reverse, given that a now dominant connection of nature
with politics assumes that the supposedly crooked timber of human nature
renders all atempts at a radically more just world either futile or dangerous.
I would call this widely held argument an inverted or twisted Aristotelian-
ism. It is Aristotelian to the extent that Aristotle used to justify a political
measure or form of government, institution (e.g. slavery) and the like by
ultimately appealing to nature. Liberal political theory is fraught with such
recourses to nature when capitalism and its basic tenets are at stake. How-
ever, unlike much liberal political theory, Aristotle linked the natural with
the just. He assumed that everything natural is good and that the unjust is
unnatural. He could thus embrace an anticoercion principle. Coercion
is not, in Aristotles eyes, an essential feature of political rule. It is no more
the function of a ruler to coerce his subjects than it is for a physician to
coerce his patients. As David Keyt remarks, for someone brought up on
Thomas Hobbes this idea can be dicult to grasp, David Keyt, Aristotle
and the Ancient Roots of Anarchism, Topoi 15 (1996): 139. Indeed, it is no
accident that from early modernity onwards, the Aristotelian connection of
nature and justice is by and large inverted, since now the natural tendency
is presented as being towards injustice, and nature (the unruly appetites of
men) becomes the ultimate argument for a coercive and protective sense
of law. Thought through, when politics is at stake, the inverted Aristotelian
recourse to nature ofen leads to anti-utopianism. For a more developed
discussion of this see Marianna Papastephanou, Educated Fear and Educated
Hope (Roterdam: Sense P, 2009), especially Chapter 8.
55
Cambiano, Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, 30. On other such confu-
sions to which Aristotle was led by his insistence on the natural slavery see
Speculations II
70
that it is natures intention also to erect a physical dier-
ence between the body of the free man and that of the slave.
Yet, further, he admits: the contrary of natures intention,
however, ofen happens: there are some slaves who have the
bodies of free menas there are others who have a free
mans soul.
56
The word ofen has a special signicance for
commentators, as it makes the major problems of Aristotles
position emerge more clearly. As Cambiano notes, Aristotle
ofen claims that nature never does anything in vain. He
admits exceptions to this rule, as in the cases of monsters.
Then again, exceptions which escape the control of nature
are precisely exceptions, that is, rare. In other words, whilst
monstrosities are rare, a slave possessing a free mans body
is frequent. Moreover, monstrosities are placed on a lower
level than the norm: compared to man, the monsterAris-
totle claimsis not even human. Here, instead, we are faced
with a body having properties higher than those that he
should have.
57
More generally, Aristotles notorious naturalist
defence of slavery was not even defensible within his own
architectonic for reasons such as those indicated here as well
as for other reasons, which are unrelated to our discussion
and too many to account here.
58
Aristotles opponents hold that not only is there op-
position between nature and nomos but that nature is the
positive value.
59
Unlike them and against their focusing on
a minimalist conception of natural commonality, Aristotle
focuses on dierences. He ignores the constructed character
Schlaifer, Greek Theories of Slavery, 193.
56
Aristotle, Politics, 1254b 27-34. I preserve Cambianos italics here and,
instead of translating from Greek into English myself, I borrow the English
translation from Cambiano, Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, 29.
57
Cambiano, Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, 30.
58
For the later reasons, see Olav Eikeland, Te Ways of Aristotle (Berlin: Peter
Lang, 2008). As Eikeland puts it, Aristotles atempts at keeping natural
slaves, manual workers, and women outside full membership in the primary
and best political constitution of he hodos, is impossible to defend even within
the limits of his own system of thought, Eikeland, Te Ways of Aristotle, 493.
59
Cambiano, Aristotle and the Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, 37.
71
(through socialization) of such dierences and turns them
into a supposed token of justied inequality.
To some commentators, the sophist Lycophron was the
rst to denounce slavery.
60
In Platos Gorgias, Calicles holds
that slavery may be contrary to natural justice.
61
However, the
scholiast of Aristotles Politics personalized the anonymized
adversaries as the poet Philemon and the sophist Alcidamas.
Philemon wrote: Though one is a slave, he is a man no less
than you, master; he is made of the same esh. No one is a
slave by nature; it is fate that enslaves the body.
62
Alcidamas
declared: god lef all men free; nature made no one a slave.
63

Before we proceed, let us examine whether we have here just
an exception or a real undercurrent. Agamben distinguishes
between example and exception regarding the amenability of
things to be grouped with like otherswhich is, in fact, the
condition for their nameability. The example functions as
an exclusive inclusion whereas the exception is an inclusive
exclusion.
64
The exception is the exact inverse of the example
because the former demonstrates non-membership or ex-
clusion by reference to the class from which it is excluded
whereas the later demonstrates membership by choosing
an individual member that it simultaneously excludes.
65

Now, Philemons and Alcidamass views are at the same time
an example and an exception. They are an exception in the
sense that they are not the dominant views in antiquity, they
60
Schlaifer, Greek Theories of Slavery, 200.
61
Plato, Gorgias, 484ab.
62
The Greek original: kan doulos h tis, sarka tin aytin echei; physei gar oudeis
doulos egenithi pote, h dau tchi to soma katedoulosato, Schlaifer, Greek
Theories of Slavery, 200. I use the English translation from Rifin, Aristotle
on Equality, 277.
63
In Greek: elefherous ake pantas theos; oudena doulon h fsis pepoiiken,
Schlaifer, Greek Theories of Slavery, 200. I take the English translation
from Vlastos, Slavery in Platos Thought, 294.
64
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 21-22.
65
Paul M. Livingston, Agamben, Badiou, and Russell, Continental Philosophy
Review 42 (2009): 307.
Speculations II
72
do not enjoy social currency and they are not endorsed by
many thinkers. Yet, if we place them within a sequence or a
set of similar, and, in our eyes, equally exceptional views, e.g.
those of the Cynics,
66
of the Cyrenaics,
67
of Euripides (by the
laws of nature, through the world equality was established
68

and so on, we see that Aristotle justiably takes these views
as exemplary of a trend. This reveals a trait that characterizes,
in my account, undercurrents more generally: for, at a given
time, undercurrents are both example and exception. Seen
from the perspective of the establishment or of generalizations
about an era, the undercurrent is considered exceptional. Yet,
to merit the name undercurrent it must be something more
than just a rarity; it must encompass enough like cases and
some repetitiveness so as to have a kind of living presence
under the currents and to be distinct from an evanescent
exceptionalism.
Be that as it may, from those others grouped as a trend by
Aristotle, let us single out the sophist Alcidamas. Alcidamas
proclaimed that no one is a slave by nature and that divinity
lef everyone free. The context of that proclamation is the
oration [Messiniaka] of which the proclamation is the only
extant part. There Alcidamas defended the liberation of the
Messenian helots (the slaves of the Spartans) by the Thebans
in 370 bce, and this atests to the revolutionary enthusiasm
69

implicit in the call to endorse the vision of a change as radi-
cal as the liberation of slaves on grounds of what is true and
naturally justied against habit and law.
70

66
Rifin, Aristotle on Equality, 276.
67
Ibid., 277.
68
Ibid., 277.
69
The second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence of
1776, which reads we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalien-
able rights, oers itself to an interesting comparison with Alcidamass view,
but this is beyond the scope of this paper.
70
The helots, the subjects who rebelled against the Spartans in Messenia
created an event of which a sophist rather than a philosopher took notice
and subtracted its truth from the maze of sense.
73
It is interesting that what Alcidamas says goes against not
just Greek nomos but also common nomos (i.e., nomos that
embraces, beyond the Hellenic world, all the slave-owning
societies). As Cambiano explains, common meant valid
not only inside a single polis but even beyond its borders
and beyond the present time.
71
Thus, Alcidamas must have
rejected a universalism of conventional commonality (in
other words, of the trans-historical and inter-spatial social
currency) for the sake of a naturalistically grounded truth:
that of universal freedom and the unwarranted and contin-
gent nature of enslavement.
By contrast, Aristotle takes up the idea of a universally
(=commonly) accepted rule so as to give it rational legitimacy
through naturalism and essentialization. Aristotles move is
exemplary of the more general tendency to depriving thought
of its critical edge through the habit of reverting to natural
(i.e. socially normalized) concepts and categories.
72
The sub-
versive move of Alcidamas (just as that of Antiphon that we
saw earlier) is to recruit nature for the opposite purpose, i.e.,
to challenge an unjust practice by denaturalizing it. Slavery is
not an ontological category: in fact, there is no slavery, strictly
speaking, but there is enslavement that produces slavery
as a mode of (in)existence in a determinate world. There
is no group of people that are ontologically determined as
qualitatively dierent from their owners. The existence of
the slave is relational.
The above has implications for the theorization of the
relation between the philosopher and the sophist. We may
agree with Badiou that when the sophist reminds us that
the category of Truth is void, but he does so only in order to
negate all truth, he must be combated. We may also agree
71
Cambiano, Anonymous Opponents of Slavery, 24.
72
Norris, Badious Being and Event, 155. It is this naturalizing tendency of
natural language that Badiou regards as having always exertednowadays
(alas) with the encouragement and blessing of large sections of the intellectual
communitya conformist or downright soporic inuence whose source
is the idea that thought cannot possibly (intelligibly) claim to break with
the informing values and beliefs of its own cultural community, Ibid., 133.
Speculations II
74
that when philosophy is led to dogmatic terror and tries to
annihilate its opponent, the sophist will have an easy time
showing the compromises of philosophical desire with
tyrannies
73
and will justiably atack truth by saying that there
is no truth but only sense. However, the case of Alcidamas
(just as that of Antiphon previously) adds more complexity.
For, Aristotle negates truth (all men are free) for the sake of
sense (the conventional view that some naturally deserve to
be slaves) that he mistakes as truth and enhances its social
status. Contra the philosopher, the sophist negates sense for
the sake of a truth that is too radical and transcendent to enjoy
social currency as yet but which is declared by the sophist a
trutha truth against sense.
74
Aristotle discussed the view against slavery in his Politics
much against the contemporary tendency of some trends
and academic circles to ignore present-day undercurrents.
Aristotle did not annihilate the sophist opponents. He just
allocated them their usual place: that of the thinkers who are
supposedly unable to perceiveor unwilling to concede the
existence ofa truth and they thus atribute it to convention.
Interestingly, Aristotles seting his opponents in a typecast
role and refuting their views secured their extant place in
history the very moment that it xed them in the place of
the undercurrent, never to become metonymy or evental site.
In responding to those opponents, to the episteme that they
tried to redeem against the current, to the counterintuitive
that they defended, Aristotle counterposed an alternative ac-
count of nature which in fact intellectualized conventional
and intuitive wisdom and transformed it into a supposedly
eternal truth, atributing fallaciously to a specic doxa the
status of episteme. Alcidamass declaration was a truth that
broke with the axiomatic principle that governs any situ-
ation of slavery and organizes its repetitive series. Against
73
Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, 134-135.
74
We may formulate it thus: slave owning society can change because hav-
ing slaves is not a practice based on an eternal truth grounded in nature
and logically defended but it is only a practice of the existing societies. The
truth about humanity is that no one is a slave by nature.
75
the sophist, Aristotle responded to the subtracted truth by
rening, systematizing and further rationalizing the conven-
tional truth that the dominant axiomatic principle (some
are meant to be slaves) establishes.
75
Aristotle thus contrib-
uted to the making sure that the repetitive series of slavery
would have had a great future before it, possibly against the
practical syllogisms that might have underpinned his own
decision as a dying man to free his slaves
76
a move that,
outside psycho-biographical terms, may be amenable to an
interesting reading as a demonstrative act.
77

Te Philosophers and the Sophists
The sibling rivalry between philosophy and what resembles
it, i.e., sophistry
78
ofen informs the idea of some modern
commentators that the great philosophers of Antiquity were
not Plato and Aristotle, but Gorgias and Protagoras.
79
Against
those commentators, instead of asking to cure the West from
Plato and Aristotle, we may insist, with Badiou, on the lasting
signicance of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. But what
75
This renement shows us that not only truth can nd an elaborate
ground as thought progresses but also that falsity can nd more and more
sophisticated support and be made irrefutable in the consciousness of the
lay people, just like contemporary justications of inequalities in educa-
tional outcomes have found highly elaborate naturalizations which in turn
naturalize distinction and privilege.
76
For Aristotles will, see Diogenes Laertius, Te Lives and Opinions of Eminent
Philosophers, trans. C.D. Yonge (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853). Scanned and Edited
for Peithos Web. Downloaded (01/05/2010) from: htp://w.classicpersua-
sion.org/pw/diogenes/index.htm
77
Demonstrative acts are the kind that Aristotle counted as the proper
outcome of practical syllogisms, that is, modes of reasoning whereby cer-
tain statements (minor premises) about some given situation, along with
a statement of principle (major premise) relevant to that same situation,
should most tingly be taken to conclude not in a further statement but
in a suitable, appropriate or rationally deducible action, Norris, Badious
Being and Event, 164.
78
79
Speculations II
76
the above examples of ancient sophistike can do is to show us
that there had been a third way between a trend of thought
that insisted on convention at the expense of truth and a trend
of thought that, despite its philosophical greatness, it ofen
succumbed to strictly un-philosophical rationalization and
turned convention into a supposedly eternal truth. Antiphon
and Alcidamass positions cure both philosophy and sophistry
from sense by insisting on more truth and less sense. Viewed
as a mediating trend, they constitute a challenge to the analogy
of ancient with modern sophistry (which informs Badiou)
and to the rigidity of places it allocates to thinkers. And, as an
undercurrent (then as now), this version of sophistry that I
describe as sophistike renders problematic the sibling rivalry
as it has so far been presented in (post)modern terms.
Afer all, on the issues that I have discussed here, the views
of Gorgias did not dier that much from those of Plato and
from conventionat least, if Plato rightly atributed to Gorgias
the thesis that the virtues of man and woman, free man and
slave, are dierent.
80
As to Protagoras, that he can be regarded
as a precursor of the thinkers who condemned slavery in the
fourth century bce is considered controversial, to say the
least.
81
Hence, the either (Plato and Aristotle)/or (Protago-
ras and Gorgias) of our era (along lines of great esteem) is
a symptom of reductivism and inatention to the richness
and complexity of a determinate world. I argue that, while
preserving, for good but varying reasons, the appreciation of
Plato and Aristotle, as well as of Gorgias and Protagoras, it is
possible to show that some minor ancient sophists did not
just resemble philosophers but they were great philosophers
too in using the pincers of philosophy and seizing truths.
Alcidamas and Antiphonwho gure nowhere in the
historico-philosophical count-as-one of the philosophers
adversarycontested the purely cultural constructions that
were passed o as natural truths. That granted, now, let us
80
Plato, Meno, 73d.
81
See for instance Thanassis Samaras, Protagoras and Slavery, Histor of
Political Tought 27, 1 (2006): 1-9.
77
make a crucial clarication in order to avoid a possible mis-
understanding. Badiou would not dispute that sophists could
correct the tendencies to sacralizing ideas that philosophers
ofen displayed. But he seems to think that sophists did so
exclusively by relativizing all truth in favour of sense. The
ancient sophist had already replaced truth with the mixture
of force and convention.
82
I have shown that this had not
always been the case. What is unusual and has passed unno-
ticed is the fact that gures of sophistry such as Alcidamas
and Antiphon countered sense-passing-as-truth by recourse
to truth itself as distinct from, prior to, and corrective of sense.
In other words, they performed philosophical operations of
seizure of the truth that was obscured by conventional con-
structions of meaning. It is important to recall here Badious
own position on the intuitive. Alcidamas and Antiphon went
beyond intuitionif, along with Badiou, who objects to the
claim that intuition might yield valid insights or conceptual
progress, we take intuition to be just the name applied to
preconceived habits of belief.
83
Though sophists, Antiphon
and Alcidamas opposed to sense the real of the truths whose
seizing they carried out. They exposed the monstrosity of the
intuitive and redeemed the counterintuitive.
Antiphon and Alcidamas did not just ignore dierences.
They did something much more radical. They claimed pre-
cisely that the dierences according to which barbarians
were naturalistically contrasted to the Greeks and slaves were
excluded from the category of human equals were contingent
and thus not true. Antiphon and Alcidamas went against doxa,
i.e., a mere opinion or a consensus belief, by contrasting the
doxa of the times to axioms that utilized the tension between
physei and thesei and by favouring physei. Equality of all was
defended as a truth given by physis, that is, one that persists
despite thesis and the illusions the later produces by the
habitual over-reliance on the evidence of intuitive sense
(the slavish behaviour, the servility, the fear of the master,
82
83
Speculations II
78
the appearance of the slaves body, etc.). By arguing so, they
disrupted the consistent multiplicity that was dominant in
their times. At another level, by being those who argued so,
they can now disrupt the contemporary count-as-one that
equates ancient and modern sophists and associates them
only with sense against philosophers as guardians of truth.
84

Evental-truths or resembling evental-truths?
This is not just about critiquing a sweeping idea of antiquity,
paying atention to historical detail, seting the record straight
about some version of ancient sophistry and performing a
deconstruction of the category sophist. Much less is it the
trivial objection that Badiou associates events and truth
exclusively with philosophy. Surely, subtracting truth is
not the exclusive prerogative of philosophers, and Badious
emblematic gure, Saint Paul, was not a philosopher anyway.
Then again, some neat categorizations of allocated space,
of the place in which philosophy and sophistry might nd
themselves regarding truth, are, indeed, complicated by the
undercurrent. But, much more deeply, the complexity of the
operations of the undercurrent raises some questions about
the drastic opposition between being and event and about the
exceptionalism that ends up incriminating the quotidian as
well as all theoretical articulation within a world.
We have so far approached Antiphons and Alcidamass
ideas (that, naturally, there is neither Greek nor barbarian,
neither slave nor free) as truths. Would that seem acceptable
or rather odd in the Badiouian context of evental-truth? The
question for an event is: what is the destiny, afer the event,
84
The one can now be treated as the product of a certain formal opera-
tion, that is to say, a procedure of counting or grouping that imposes some
order on an otherwise inchoate since open-ended multiplicity but which
is alwaysand for just that reasonexposed to the potentially disturbing
eect of that which nds no place in the existing conceptual domain since it
exists as a supernumerary element excluded from the count-as-one, Norris,
Badious Being and Event, 40. It is important for this paper, as it describes a
procedure that holds equally for the tailoring of Greek thought to a wisdom
that is politically event-less.
79
of an inexistent of the world? What becomes of the poor
worker afer the revolution?
85
In our case: what becomes of
the barbarian and the slave afer Antiphon and Alcidamas?
Not having consequences such as the abolition of slavery or
such as overcoming the political associations of the term
barbarian, do the Antiphontic and Alcidamian ideas qualify
as truths in the Badiouan idiom?
For Badiou, there is no stronger transcendental conse-
quence than the one which makes what did not exist in a
world appear within it.
86
In the 2003 English translation of
this section from Logiques des Mondes (that is, 3 years before
the French original publication of the whole book) the fol-
lowing precedes the above sentence: Everything depends,
therefore, on the consequences.
87
What does this say about
our examples of Alcidamas and Antiphon? If everything
depends on the consequences produced for the inexistent,
our examples are ill-assorted in a set of evental truths. Fur-
ther, Badiou sees politics as collective action, organized by
certain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a
new possibility which is currently repressed by the dominant
order.
88
Was Alcidamass idea, for instance, not a truth but just
a new possibility repressed by the law of that determinate
world? Or, rather, the new possibility was the politics that
could derive from the truth of Alcidamass statement? If the
later is more accurate, that would entail that Alcidamass
statement and its truth is a mater quite independent from
the possibility it could open or not. A missed opportunity,
a lost chance for humanity; yet, a preserved and postponed
truth, one that raises issues: of peoples ability to seize the
opportunities of thought that a specic, determinate world
and time oer; and of how to heighten that ability.
Furthermore, was Alcidamass dictum a truths appearing,
85
86
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2, trans. Alberto Toscano
(London: Continuum, 2009), 376.
87
Alain Badiou, Logic of the Site, Diacritics 33, (2003): 147.
88
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hyothesis, New Lef Review 49 (2008): 31.
Speculations II
80
one that defended an insurrection that founded no duration,
89

but could nevertheless be described as a strong singularity
since it proposed to thought a rule of emancipation and of
radical egalitarianism and universality? How do we recog-
nize a strong singularity? And, can we assume rather safely
the status that could be atributed to Alcidamass idea within
Badious philosophy? Badiou again: The strong singularity
can be recognized by the fact that its consequence in the
world is to make exist within it the proper inexistent of the
object-site.
90
Given a singularity whose intensit of existence,
as instantaneous and as evanescent as it may be, is nevertheless
maximal, we may consider it an event, if, in consequence of the
(maximal) intensit of the site, something whose value of existence
was null in the situation takes on a positive value of existence.
91

But in the ancient situation, strictly speaking, the value of the
slave-being had been null and remained so long afer Alcidamas.
However, in the history of truths understood, inter alia, as a
set of universal principles Alcidamas oered an important
addition. Yet, most probably, the positive value of existence
that Badiou talks about is not the theoretical-abstract one,
gained when something is voiced and then archived in the
record of humanitys textuality, but rather the actual existence
in the socio-political space. In the case of Alcidamas, it would
mean to set on course a chain of such consequences up to
the insurrection of slaves and the demand of their freedom
(even if such an insurrection eventually fails). On the contrary,
the insurrection preceded Alcidamass dictum, or, dierently
put, Alcidamas phrased the truth of that insurrection.
92
As
89
Because it carries out a transitory cancellation of the gap between being
and being-there, a site is the instantaneous revelation of the void that haunts
multiplicities. A site is an ontological gure of the instant: it appears only
to disappear, Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 369. The logic of the site involves the
distribution of intensities around the vanished point which the site is. Thus,
true duration can only be that of consequences.
90
Ibid., 377.
91
Badiou, Logic of the Site, 147. His emphasis.
92
There had been many insurrections of the helots but, only of the Messenian
one we know that it was accompanied by a theoretical claim that failed to
81
to Antiphon, neither option seems relevant, as there is no
indication that his tract is evental or post-evental.
Instead of being theorized as event or singularity,
93
the
Antiphontic or the Alcidamian idea could be seen from
a Badiouian perspective as a false event or, at most, a fact:
We will call fact a site whose intensity of existence is not
maximal.
94
Seen from the perspective of change, and, not
from the perspective of the truth of the corresponding judg-
ments, on which Badiou is silent, the fact is ontologically
supernumerary but existentially (and thus logically) weak,
while singularity is ontologically supernumerary and its
value of appearance (or of existence) is maximal.
95
Is that
all we may say about Alcidamass and Antiphons ideas? That
they were simply facts that made a supernumerary nd a weak
and volatile existence until the site vanished? By examining
whether the Alcidamian and Antiphontic ideas could qualify
as truths, we reach a stage where it becomes apparent that,
within Badiouian philosophy, truth concerns only the actu-
ality of states, and not counterfactuality. Truth as unfullled
promise voiced and articulated as propositional content, yet
still in search of subjects capable of discerning and defending
it, is given up, as if it were incompatible with truth as creative
action. In my opinion, the binary between truth as action, on
the one hand, and truth as judgment, suggestion, or insight
in need of defence and dialogue, on the other, is disabling as
it makes truth too dependent on atempted/eected rather
than envisaged/intended change.
If the lack of evental eects does not diminish truth-quality,
atract the atention of the world (thinkers included), then and now, even if,
as a secular idea, and disconnected from its original seting, it was destined
to become knowledge (in the sense of having the deserved character of an
indisputable certainty and indispensable truth) over two thousand years later.
93
By its existential insignicance, a site is hardly dierent to the simple
continuation of the situation. Only a site whose value of existence is maxi-
mal is potentially an event, Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 372. Therefore, we will
call singularit a site whose intensity of existence is maximal, ibid., 372.
94
Ibid., 372.
95
Ibid., 372.
Speculations II
82
then, this means that statements of counterfactual rather than
actual eects (that is, statements or facts having validity [Gl-
tigkeit] even when deprived of the social currency [Geltung]
that eects revolutionary practice) qualify as truths. At least,
they are no less truths than those which were recognized as
such and had world-historical eects. Seeing them otherwise
leads to the paradox of making an ideas validity and uni-
versality conditional on who has voiced it or on the context
within which she has voiced it. The paradox becomes obvious
when we consider how identical the content of Alcidamass
and Antiphons statements is in terms of universality and
equality with the Pauline truth: there is neither Greek nor Jew,
there is neither slave nor free. Why, when it comes to their
truth, should one make the drastic choice of Saint Paul over
sophistike or vice versa? Between the Alcidamian truth (which
did not mobilize a revolutionary procedure) and the Pauline
truth (which did result in a new situation), Badious theory
forces him to choose the Pauline and allocate the Alcidamian
into the maze of sense. Doing otherwise, Badiou would have
to concede that truth is also judgment no mater what else it
might be and that an epistemology of a kind is in order when
statements claiming the status of truths are at stake. It seems
paradoxical that the same ideas do not qualify as truths of
an equal footing just because the former were not followed,
whereas the later actually eected a change of a kind. To avoid
this paradox, Badiou would have to theorize more explicitly
the pre-evental in social-epistemological rather than social-
ontological terms. This might lead to the possibility of truth
being potentially unveiled and disseminated by argumenta-
tion and dialogue in ways that would re-introduce a specic
politics, e.g., a Habermasian one, that Badiou sees, and to
some extent justiably, as pacifying,
96
but which Badiou does
not wish to rehabilitate by pressing it up against its connes
and recasting it in his own terms.
96
It might also lead to a specic conception of subjectivity (which would
be at odds with, or not quite ting to, the post-humanist conception of
subjectivity), one that, admitedly, needs to be worked out if it is to avoid
both the poststructuralist-anti-humanist and the humanist conceptions.
83

Conclusion
The Greek determinate world was not a situation of pure im-
manence, but it included its own transcendence in potentials
that were never followed, in counterfactual possibilities. More
generally, the undercurrent is not the non-theorized remain-
der or reminder of the supernumerary, the internal anomaly
that haunts the logical structure of a system. It is, rather, the
theorization/theorizability (even if in an elliptic or incomplete
manner) of the until-then supernumerary; a theorization, how-
ever, that remains largely unacknowledged and defeated. The
undercurrent is neither included nor excluded by the given
worlds order but rather treated: as secondary, as exception, a
minor disruption of the smooth ow of majoritarian thought,
or inadequately framed, under-theorized, unconvincing and
non-systematic. It may be true that the undercurrent ofen
appears as almost indistinguishable from the uterly per-
verse, highly unlikely, quaint, preposterous ideas that might
be utered so as to exploit the social benets of eccentricity,
e.g. when one is admired because nobody else would have
made that kind of thought. But, when all undercurrents are
thus treated, people and ideas are swept under the rug and
the walls of what theory presents become heavily fortied.
We have seen that, for Badiou, what are initially opposed
to normal multiplicities (which are presented and repre-
sented) are singular multiplicities, which are presented but
not represented.
97
Surely, they are not represented if by
representation we mean socio-political membership and
recognition. But a proper account of being and event as two
drastically disparate realms opposed to one another would
require something more: that something fails to be repre-
sented also in consciousness, thought and quotidian life and
not just in established socio-political order. I have argued
that inconsistent multiplicities may not just exist but also be
represented in customs, habits and in unconscious suspen-
97
Speculations II
84
sions of time and/or in theory through underdeveloped or
marginal ideas. True, this does not automatically amount to
actions for changing radically a situation but it means that the
potential for change is located within quotidian normalcy. The
later, which may be described by adapting the Vorgefundene
or magma (if we may use a term from Husserl and Castoria-
des respectively, for lack of any other at hand), encompasses
social imaginary signications beyond those embodied in
institutions. It encompasses undercurrents and counterfactual
possibilities, awaiting critical atention and propagation so
as to possibly acquire the status of cataclysmic event.
We have also seen that Badiou maintains a categorical
distinction between such basically normalizing concepts
as nature, consistency, representation and the state con-
ceived in onto-mathematical or onto-political terms and
such intrinsically resistant or inassimilable terms as event,
presentation and singularity, taken as dening the realms
of history and politics.
98
I have argued that there is nothing
basically and necessarily normalizing about the concepts
of nature or representation and inescapably inimical to the
intrinsically resistant idea of truth as a surplus (though not
necessarily an epiphanic one) of validity beyond hegemony.
The cases of Alcidamas and Antiphon render problematic
the epiphanic nature that Badiou atributes to truth and the
tout court dependency of it on consequences. For, rather than
being an absolute break with the everyday reality of appear-
ing, they are a part of it and represent its counterfactual pos-
sibilities, the routes of thought that have not been pursued.
Ultimately, what is pushed aside by the philosophical em-
phasis on the epiphanic and exceptional, almost miraculous
interruption of the supposed normalcy of the quotidian is the
perception of the operation of the undercurrent. In hindsight,
the undercurrent has an educational value for heightening
our present-day awareness of what is vibrant yet unnoticed,
half-buried as it is in realities of power. As a residue (or side-
eect) of older metaphysics of presence, the subject-object
98
85
philosophy makes us feel that a truth is a truth only when
there are mindsout there and here and nowto recognize
it as such. Badiou combats older humanist metaphysics, and
his philosophy represents a valuable invigoration of realist
conceptions of truth. However, it is not always clear that Badiou
leaves room in his philosophy for the truth that is sometimes
available in some forms yet does not enjoy wider acceptance
because the subjects who would recognize it need to be cre-
ated. Education should aspire, amongst other things, to the
creation of such subjectivities. Surely, not all undercurrents
have a truth quality; yet, education as critique, foresight and
preparation should not be neglected, and a way (yet, surely,
not the only one) of giving it its due atention is by redeem-
ing the interest in the undercurrent and in the possibility of
subjects discerning its truth and making it of consequence.

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Te Philosopher, the Sophist,

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